videography

Whether or not you know how to play Chess, one of the world’s oldest games, it is highly likely the checkered board and famously recognizable playing pieces are nothing new to you. However, few know the story of The Staunton Chess Set and how it became the standard around the world. Read more

This is how you do it filmakrs: gorgeous well-composed steady shots in glorious Moondog Labs anamorphic Home Movie Masters take note of this experiment from Donald Rees with his MoondogLabs lens and our Filmakr app at the Vancouver Aquarium!Read more

Found in the Warm & Natural set, this Filmakr LUT-based filter is named after the 1978 film Terrence Malick film Days Of Heaven.

Malick and cinematographer Nestor Almendros modeled the film’s cinematography on classic silent films, which often used natural light. They drew inspiration from painters Johannes Vermeer, Edward Hopper (particularly his House by the Railroad), and Andrew Wyeth, as well as photo-reporters from the start of the 20th century.

Much of the film was shot during the early morning or late evening right before the sun has set, what has become known as “magic hour”, which Almendros called “a euphemism, because it’s not an hour but around 25 minutes at the most. It is the moment when the sun sets, and after the sun sets and before it is night. The sky has light, but there is no actual sun. The light is very soft, and there is something magic about it. It limited us to around twenty minutes a day, but it did pay on the screen. It gave some kind of magic look, a beauty and romanticism.” Lighting was integral to filming and helped evoke the painterly quality of the landscapes in the film. A vast majority of the scenes were filmed late in the afternoon or after sunset, with the sky silhouetting the actors faces, which would otherwise be difficult to see. Critics were unanimous in citing the photography as a technical milestone.

The production ran so late that both Almendros and camera operator John Bailey had to leave due to a prior commitment on François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women (1977). Almendros approached cinematographer Haskell Wexler to complete the film. They worked together for a week so that Wexler could get familiar with the film’s visual style.

In 2007, Days of Heaven was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. We’re looking forward to the remake with all those killer CGI effects — biplanes, locust swarms, digital sunsets! Not.

This is my Mojo on Mojo series continued… : ) This whole video about Beastgrip was shot, edited and shared on the same device using one piece of software, Filmkar, for a complete 360 mobile production. Play it back on YouTube at 1440 to see quality. Doing this has confirmed for me that 4K is very useful not so much for posting in 4K, but when the bitrate gets knocked down from 100 or 50 mbps to around 25 mbps, the footage compresses incredibly well. So I’m sold on 4K (unfortunately! — Download the 3840×2160 file on Vimeo for full quality) Final film edit is 1.27GB out of 67.35GB in the project. Read more

Not that Filmakr doesn’t shoot content for broadcast tv and the web, but now we’re going to be included inside of a first-of-a-kind digital book app experience. Here’s a sweet photo from Tristan Pope making the Filmakr UI look as sexy as the model dude.